Poe Studies Association Updates

In the summer of 1820, Edgar Allan Poe and his foster family returned from Britain. Two hundred years later, due to COVID-19, we find ourselves banned from traveling abroad and, in many instances, within our own nations. Countless events have been canceled, and our routines have been interrupted. Some of us have been afflicted with this serious illness. In response to the pandemic, the Poe Studies Association has harnessed the power of the virtual meeting to continue operations. In addition to using this platform for our executive committee meetings, we are now offering monthly online forums. In June, Cristina Peréz, member-at-large, hosted our first session. Please watch the listserv for more information. All of these sessions are recorded, and the videos are available on the Conferences page of the PSA website, https://www.poestudiesassociation.org/. I want to commend Travis Montgomery, our PSA secretary, for keeping our website updated in general, and that Conferences page in particular.Our greatest challenge during COVID-19 has been deciding when to hold the Fifth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference. Thanks to the hard work of our conference organizers, Paul Lewis and Richard Kopley, we were able to renegotiate our contract with the Omni Parker House Hotel and postpone the event one year. “Poe Takes Boston” is now scheduled for Thursday, April 7, to Sunday, April 10, 2022. As Paul Lewis remarked, “We hope that by April 2022 the current health crisis will have been resolved. It is important to all of us to have a safe, traditional, in-person conference—a Boston conference that is really in Boston.”In these uncertain times, I urge you to follow the listserv closely. We will continue to plan our sessions for the MLA and ALA, as well as the international conference. However, plans may change quite suddenly. The listserv is the best way for us to communicate these changes.In closing, I want to thank everyone for their adaptability. We held our election, and our awards committee met its charge despite the challenge of severely limited library access. The PSA gave the following awards for 2019: The James W. Gargano Award for an outstanding scholarly article was awarded to Jeffrey Weinstock for “Before the After: Anticipatory Anxiety and Experience Claimed in Poe's Angelic Dialogues,” Poe Studies 52 (2019): 91–109. The Patrick F. Quinn Award for an outstanding monograph on Poe was awarded to John Cullen Gruesser for Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). And the J. Lasley Dameron Award for an outstanding essay collection or bibliography was awarded to Gerald J. Kennedy and Scott Peeples for The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (Oxford University Press, 2019). The PSA executive committee would like to thank this year's awards committee—Kelly Ross (chair), Bill Engel, and José Manuel Correoso Rodenas—for their fine work, especially under the circumstances caused by COVID.I am honored to serve as your president, and I wish you all good health and manageable stress levels as we face the winter months.The Poe Studies Association is currently slated to run a roundtable titled “Revisiting Poe's Poems” at the MLA Convention in Toronto from January 7 to 10, 2021. If, due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, the convention is cancelled or the format is changed to that of a virtual conference, the officers and executive committee of the PSA will announce on the PSA listserv whether this roundtable will be held virtually or postponed until the next MLA Convention. The current participants include Les Harrison, Maria Ishikawa, Stephen Rachman, and Edward Whitley.I am very grateful to you for having elected me again to be a member-at-large of the Poe Studies Association. I have enjoyed serving for the last two terms, and I am enthusiastic about continuing to work toward creating a strong community in the organization and fostering scholarly interest in Poe. Thank you for your encouragement!Two panels will be presented at the 2021 ALA in Boston: “Poe in the Wireless Classroom” and “Poe's Environmental Humanities.” We plan to keep our original panelists, although we understand that plans might have changed during this year. We will provide more information in the next issue of the Poe Review. Until then, stay safe!There are no PSA elections scheduled for 2021. Throughout the summer and fall of 2020, the PSA hosted Zoom forums. Recordings of the sessions are available on the PSA website. To access those recordings, use the link on the “Conferences” page.As of September 14, 2020, we have 184 members. The checking account is $25,332.98. Restricted funds include: the Dameron Award Fund at $1,901.88 ($1,231.88 coming from Penn State University Press); the Gargano Award has $3,460.10; the Quinn Award has $2,925.93. We hold three CDs: one for $2,363.63; one for $6,268.01; one for $10,001.70.Deducting the restricted funds and adding the CDs, we have $35,678.41 in unrestricted funds. PSA awards have not yet been distributed to the 2019 winners as of this note. Please notify me of any change of mailing address or email address at ckoros.kean@gmail.com. Contributions to PSA are tax deductible.

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